Portfolio — game & live-service backend

EMBERBOUND

a complete online mobile RPG — client, server, and a living economy

Emberbound is a personal project built end to end by one developer — game design, Unity client, game server, live operations. It is currently in a private, invite-only playtest; nothing here is a commercial offering. Every number on this page is measured from the shipped content, not aspiration.

What it is

A portrait-mode creature-collection RPG in a dying world called the Long Dusk — and, underneath it, the full anatomy of a live online game: a Unity client that plays entirely offline as a guest, a .NET server that owns accounts, trading and (behind staged flags) the economy itself, and a content pipeline where the entire game is data — 737 familiars, 524 skills, 94 enemies and every campaign board are authored records, validated by machine, rendered by one client. Adding a creature is authoring a file, not writing code.

The architecture

01
Content

every unit, skill, board and event is a validated JSON record; generators author campaigns and events; a validator gate refuses anything malformed.
02
Client

Unity, portrait-only, offline-first: the whole game runs as a local guest save; going online is a choice, not a wall.
03
Sync

client-authoritative saves with server adoption, a conflict resolver, and an anti-duplication binding so one save can never mint two accounts' worth of units.
04
Server

.NET API owning auth, vault custody, the player marketplace, guilds, mail, PvP and seasons — every vertical shipped dark behind flags and lit by ceremony.
05
Economy

a server-authoritative ledger (staged rollout): seeds each account from its own save at first contact, rolls the gacha server-side, and settles trades atomically.
06
Operations

one prod box: nginx, invite-gated registration, rate limits, encrypted off-box backups with restore drills, GDPR-correct account erasure, phased flag ceremonies with rollback stories.

The marketplace is barter-first. The Bazaar lets players list a familiar for gold, for items, for another familiar — or any mix; gold is optional, the ask is exact ("a 1-star of this unit, precisely — it matters for evolution"). Listings wrap real vault custody server-side: the traded creature genuinely leaves one account and lands in the other, atomically, fee-settled, with zero-gold barter as a first-class settle rather than a hack.

Everything dark ships dark. New capability deploys behind flags with the surface stubbed, then lights in witnessed phases: backup first, one flag at a time, a named check between each step, rollback rehearsed before the flip. The economy cutover was proven this way at population two — the one real bug it surfaced (a shop spend that granted client-side only) was caught by a witness at the stop-point, fixed, and never reached a player.

The player owns their progress — provably. Offline guest play is the default; registering binds the save to exactly one account; deleting the account is a real GDPR erasure that scrubs audit PII and survives edge cases like "the buyer of your listing erased themselves" (found, schema-fixed, regression-scripted).

The UI was rebuilt around play, not mockups. A screenshot harness renders every screen at four aspect ratios and diffs against goldens; an information-architecture sheet of 63 dev-ruled decisions governed an eight-batch rebuild — full-bleed campaign boards with a following camera, a gacha reveal that is a moment instead of a list, tap-depth targets counted and printed, and a hard law that fixed-pixel layout only ever decreases.

Feature highlights

Campaign boards

Isometric node boards, full-bleed with a following camera; one renderer serves campaign, events and the endless descent.
Capture & rites

Capture mid-run; grow familiars through Sacrifice, Empower, Evolve and the Mythic Forge — stakes confirmed, costs always visible.
The Calling

The summon: server-rolled, pity-tracked, revealed full-screen one card at a time.
The Bazaar

A real player market — barter-first listings, exact-star asks, vault custody, atomic settles.
Guilds & friends

Friend codes, guild founding with a real cost, invites — one identity idiom throughout.
PvP — the Trial

Asynchronous ladder with defense setups, seasons, and rank rewards claimed exactly once.
Live events

Windows-honest event system — the UI renders from schedule truth and can never advertise a dead event.
Ops you can audit

Invite-gated registration, rate limits, restore-drilled backups, GDPR erasure, and a forensics habit that once proved a mystery restart was just Ubuntu.

How it was built

Emberbound is developed with a disciplined multi-agent AI workflow: one planning instance that rules on evidence and never touches code, two coding instances owning client and server, the developer as ferry and final gate — and a written law above all of it: a ruling is not a fact about the code. Every change is contract-first, machine-verified, then human-played before it counts. The same method built Neptune; Emberbound is it at full scale — twenty-plus rounds, a lit economy, zero player-facing incidents.